Why Is It Important to set a language of a headstone?

A

AYoung

started a topic
about 1 month ago

You love to transcribe photos. However, your native language is English and you keep getting other languages. Why is this?

When a photo is taken in an English speaking country, the headstone language will be set to English regardless of whether or not the stone is in English. This is how the process works. When an individual from the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia or New Zealand upload photos from a cemetery within these countries, the headstones will all be set in either all languages or English. It works this way in other countries as well. If you take photos in Russia, all the stones within the cemetery will be in Russian, regardless of whether or not they are Russian, Ukrainian, or Polish.

Our technology is awesome, but we do not yet have the same capabilities as CSI where photographs can be read by our system and automatically filtered into specific languages. Also, there are many stones in other languages besides the predominant language spoken in a native country. For example, there are many Jewish Cemeteries in the United States with headstones in Hebrew. There are also many headstones within the U.S. that are written in Chinese. This is where we need our users to help out a bit.

If you are transcribing records in an English speaking country and a headstone pops up in a different language, please mark it! This will remove it from the English que, and place it in where transcribers can read it who do in fact read that language.

Here's the example. I set my transcriptions for English. I looked in cemeteries within the United States and specifically looked for Jewish Cemeteries. I do not speak beautiful Hebrew, but I know exactly what the language looks like. I went into a Jewish cemetery and marked all of the Hebrew stones as "Hebrew". These were immediately moved from my que, and I was moved on to another cemetery.

This also removes them from view of those who do not speak Hebrew, placing them in the que for those of our friends who do.

So in other words, when you set the language it will move the transcriptions to others who can read these stones. If you skip them they will remain in the que for all to keep going over them again and again until they are removed.

How do I set a language?

Right next to the red flag on the transcription page, there is a blue box with symbols. When you click on it, a number of language possibilities show up. Click on the correct language the stone is in and it will move the stone into transcriptions of that particular language.

By tagging these stones in their proper language it removes it from the general que, relieving the frustration of seeing the same stones again and again. This will also make it possible for these stones to be transcribed by those who can.